Just a month ago, scientists announced that they'd found the coldest place on Earth: a high ridge in the East Antarctic Plateau where it was minus 136 degrees Fahrenheit. After last week, some Chicagoans may want to nominate a few places closer to home. Here are 10 degrees worth of facts about extreme weather:

1 A storm rolled through the Thomasville, Ala., area on the morning of June 28, 1957, and, boy, did it rain. It rained fish, and it rained frogs, and it rained crayfish. Thousands of them. Some believe the animals were sent airborne by a tornado that occurred 15 miles away.

2 For the record, hailstone sizes start at marble and continue to penny, nickel, quarter, half dollar, walnut, golf ball, hen egg, tennis ball, baseball, tea cup, grapefruit and softball, according to the Storm Prediction Center. But that falls short of the largest hailstone ever confirmed: a monster nearly the size of a bowling ball that fell in Vivian, S.D., in 2010.

3 Emperor penguins famously huddle together to survive the bitter Antarctic cold, and the big ears of a jack rabbit help it stay cool in the desert heat. But the North American wood frog's answer to extreme winter weather goes to the extreme. It freezes. Despite its heart and breathing actually stopping and body temperature falling to 20 degrees, an antifreeze-like blood high in sugar supports its cell structure so it can bounce back from multiple freeze-thaw cycles every season.

4 Starting in the 1880s and lasting at least 50 years, U.S. government agencies were forbidden from forecasting tornadoes or even using the word. Officials were leery of inaccurate predictions and panicking the public. The result was that hundreds of people were killed or injured even when forecasters had been confident a violent storm was imminent.

5 The top temperature recorded in Illinois was 117 degrees in East St. Louis on July 14, 1954. But East St. Louis wasn't even the hottest place that day in a 60-mile radius. Union, Mo., across the Mississippi River, was a degree hotter.

6 Isaac Cline, head of the U.S. Weather Bureau office for the Galveston, Texas, area, wrote in 1891 that it was "simply an absurd delusion" to think the Texas coast was vulnerable to tropical storms, and "it would be impossible for any cyclone to create a storm wave which could materially injure the city." Nine years later, a hurricane devastated Galveston, killing about 8,000.

7 North America appears to be the world's dustbin. Not only do millions of tons of Asian dust from massive Gobi desert storms regularly cross the Pacific to dump all over us, but Saharan particles get blown over the Atlantic to the East Coast. Although few would welcome that much dirt, it creates vibrant sunsets and tamps down Atlantic hurricane activity.

8 Mark Twain probably never said, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." That quote is often attributed to him, but scholars can't find any direct evidence he ever said or wrote it.

9 If you need to break some ice, you can't do much better than the Coast Guard's Polar Star, called upon for a time last week to rescue the Russian and Chinese ships stuck in sea ice near Antarctica. The only U.S. heavy ice breaker can cruise at 3 knots through ice 6 feet thick. And if push comes to shove — or ramming — it can carve a path through ice more than 21 feet thick.

10 If somebody tells you it's 40 below zero, you don't need to ask if they're talking Fahrenheit or Celsius. At that temperature — and only at that temperature — the two are the same.